People make fun of the Ruby MRI runtime. The Java and Pythonistas giggle. What is interesting though is how it has been good enough for a lot of people. However, there is no reason for a Ruby runtime to be that slow, so it is great to see the competition across YARV, Rubinious, and of course JRuby.

The beauty of being slow, is that you have a lot of room to get faster :)

Want to learn about Ruby 1.9? Matz came to Google the other day to talk about it: